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Category: World Religions

  • Can the Great Religions be vehicles of salvation for their followers? —NO

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is part of our series on controversial questions. A NO post will normally follow a YES post. Join in by posting your comments.]

    by H. Van Dyke Parunak, Ph.D.

    PicThis question rests on a more fundamental issue: What is the source of our knowledge about spiritual issues? In general, there are two ways we can learn the answer to any question: personal experience, and reports from others whom we trust. In this case, we can take either route.
    Here’s how to learn the answer by personal experience: pick the Great Religion whose effectiveness you want to evaluate. Devote yourself completely to it for the rest of your life. When you die, and stand before God, you’ll know whether it can bring you salvation or not.
    The problem with this approach is like some free samples: there’s only one to a customer. It can tell me if a specific Great Religion can bring me salvation, but perhaps some can and some can’t, and if I choose the wrong one, I can’t go back and start over. To make that evaluation, I need to rely on the experience of others. At this point, we have to consider seriously the claim of the Lord Jesus:
    John 3:13 And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.
    Really, he’s making two claims. One is that he can speak on earth, from personal experience, about what happens in heaven. The other is that he is the only source of such authoritative knowledge. He backs up this claim by dying and then rising from the dead, a credential that is not shared (so far as I know) by any other historically documented person.
    If we believe his claim about access to heavenly truth, then the Lord Jesus pretty much answers the original question directly, later in John’s gospel:
    Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. John 14:6
    The exclusiveness he claims is not popular today, but it is unambiguous. If I don’t want to do the experiment myself, I have to trust some authority. If I claim to be a Christian, then it’s hard to avoid what Jesus says on the issue.
    What’s really at stake here is the source of spiritual knowledge. Our generation is victim to a hubris that can be traced back to the Greeks and even further, that we can figure out the answer to any question with our own intellect. When Job was wrestling with the reason for his misery, and accusing God of abusing him wrongly, his friends were insisting that his sufferings were punishment for sins that he refused to acknowledge. Zophar challenged him, Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? Job 11:7
    In fact, as the sequel to the book shows, Zophar is on the right side of this point. Job’s dilemma, like other great spiritual questions, is not accessible to human reason, and God condemns both sides in the debate when he appears and says, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Job 38:2
    Paul makes the same point when he writes to the Corinthians, For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. 1Co 1:21
    Knowledge of spiritual things is inaccessible to human wisdom, and that limitation is by divine design. We can only know God by his revelation, and on the question at hand, that revelation is unambiguous. The Lord Jesus’ statement in John 14:6 may be the clearest statement of the principle, but it is hardly the earliest. At Sinai, God commands Israel to forsake all other gods and worship him alone. When they disobey this command and follow after other “great religions,” God doesn’t say, “Ah well, all roads lead eventually to the top of the mountain.” Through Isaiah, he proclaims eloquently the emptiness of other deities:
    Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God. 7 And who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it, and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people? and the things that are coming, and shall come, let them shew unto them. 8 Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it? ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any. 9 They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.  Isa 44:6
    Other gods are not alternative routes to salvation. Those who worship them will be ashamed, not delivered. The people’s ecumenical explorations were the grounds by which God banishes them from their land:
    And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? … 11 Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, … 13 Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not shew you favour. Jer 16:10
    And when they return from that captivity, they acknowledge the powerlessness of other gods:
    Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. 5 They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: 6 They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: 7 They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat. 8 They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. Psa 115:4
    “So is every one that trusteth in them.” The unnamed Israelite who wrote this Psalm after the captivity had abundant experience with an alternative Great Religion, the elaborate polytheism of Babylon. His voice joins those of Moses and Isaiah, and anticipates the crowning statement of the Lord Jesus, that the only way to the Father is through his incarnate Son.

    Dr. Parunak’s profile and books can be viewed and ordered here: https://energiondirect.info/authors/authors-n-s/h-van-dyke-parunak

  • Can the great religions be vehicles of salvation for their followers? —YES

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is part of our series on controversial questions. A NO post will normally follow a YES post.  Join in by posting your comments.]

    by Herold Weiss

    Pic Whether one takes as normative the significance given to the Incarnation in the gospel According to John or the significance of the New Creation by the Spirit of the Risen Christ in the letters of Paul, in both cases what is emphasized is that God is involved in the salvation of humanity as a whole. Moreover, both sources are concerned with establishing that God’s saving activity is a dynamic force with an open future rather than a condition determined by a past event. This means that God is free to choose continuously what the future holds for the people of the earth. Barriers set up to separate people are not set in stone. No people may claim a privileged place at the divine table.
    Claims to exclusive divine election were already identified by the prophets, particularly Amos and Jeremiah, as traps that need to be avoided. Jeremiah vehemently denounced the priests and the prophets who told the people that they were assured of divine protection from the threat of a Babylonian attack. He specifically spoke against the false security that the people had on the sanctity of the temple. Their confidence that God would never allow the Jerusalem temple to be profaned by foreigners was based on a false understanding of God. Even at the risk of his own life, Jeremiah proclaimed the coming destruction of the temple, and that the people would be taken away as captives of the Babylonians.
    Amos, the first of the classical prophets of Israel, redefined election to mean responsibilities rather than privileges. The final chapter of the book that collects his oracles must have been a shocking surprise to its first readers:

    The Lord, God of hosts, he who touches the earth and it melts, and all that dwell in it mourn, and all of it rises like the Nile of Egypt; who builds his upper chambers in the heavens, and founds his vault upon the earth; who calls the waters of the sea, and pours them out upon the surface of the earth – the Lord is his name, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel?” says the Lord. “Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord are upon the sinful kingdom and I will destroy it from the surface of the ground; except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob” says the Lord.   (Amos 9:5-8)

    To argue that the exodus of the Philistines from Caphtor (Greece and Eastern Asia Minor) to the western coast of Canaan, and of the Syrians from Kir (the land between the Caspian and the Black Sea, modern Georgia) to the lands in upper Mesopotamia, is no different from the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, because the Creator God who controls nature is equally involved with the history of peoples who worship other gods was, without a doubt, a radical understanding of how the Creator God cares for all creatures.
    Paul, the preacher of the gospel of the New Creation by the power that brought forth the Risen Christ, was adamant in his insistence that the barriers that have separated human beings and have consigned them to different categories do not exist in the world of the Spirit in which the Risen Christ is the Last Adam. Besides, Paul did not give attention to the ultimate destruction of sinners, even though the imminent Parousia was very much in his mind. He was concerned with the salvation of all those who have faith in God. His Gospel is based on the promise of God to Abraham, which, as he explicitly pointed out, includes a blessing to all the nations.
    Paul shocked his fellow Jewish Christians by saying that the pagans who did not have the physical Scriptures (the Law = the Torah) as their religious heritage had the Scriptures written in their hearts and without knowledge of the Law did what the Law required. In this way he took away exclusive privileges from the Jews who prided themselves of their status as the elect of God. He explicitly classified their boasting as the worst of their sins. His perspective of humanity did not include any barrier that separate human beings from each other. He denied the value of economic (slave/free), cultural (Jew/Greek), and natural (male/female) barriers. From what he wrote, and given his universalistic understanding of the New Creation in which barriers have been eliminated, it is not at all a stretch to extend the list of obsolete barriers to include those that separate human beings from each other on account of their religion.
    Karl Rahner, one of the most respected theologians of the twentieth century, aiming at inclusivity, famously claimed that people from other religious traditions who were sincere worshipers of God are also to be saved by Christ. He described them as “anonymous Christians.” His proposal was thoroughly criticized as an unacceptable form of colonial “patronizing,” and I agree. Are Christians to be broken up into the explicit and the anonymous kinds? Rahner’s inclusiveness left barriers dividing humanity. The relationship of God to creatures under God’s care is to be left to the power and the grace of the Creator God whose ways are beyond human understanding. As Paul says more than once, “God shows no partiality.”
    It is no longer believable today to hold that only those who affirm certain doctrines and perform certain rituals enjoy the favor of the God who Amos identified correctly as the Creator, even if he did it in terms of an obsolete cosmology. To do so is to consign God’s election to a past event and to negate God’s freedom. It is to distort the character of God while pompously demonstrating spiritual false security and pride. The human need to embrace the horizon and control what happens within it, thereby ignorantly limiting the freedom of the Creator God, finds innumerable outlets, but these are just the evidence of human insecurities. They are not in any way evidence of the possession of God’s mind. The salvation of humanity has been God’s consistent concern, and God’s freedom to achieve it is without limit. There are no barriers to God’s ways to achieve God’s purpose. Human attempts to transcend insecurities by devising descriptions of God’s plans are just that. It is not a surprise to find out that these plans promote exclusive claims to be counted among the elect who will receive God’s salvation.

    Dr.Weiss’ profile and books can be viewed and ordered here: https://energiondirect.info/authors/authors-t-z/herold-weiss

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